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Where did the women folk get the idea that writing about their lives might be interesting?

From Flickr user samelovesherdog

I’m not happy right now. A few days ago I read this article in The Guardian that included phrases like “unapologetically female” and tried to link all contemporary writing by American Women back to Candance Bushnell, author of the Sex & The City column which spawned a book and the HBO series and the most obnoxious 25% of the female population of New York City. I know it’s probably silly and naive and suspiciously female of me, but I expect more from The Guardian than an article like this.

Full disclosure: I didn’t know that Sex & The City was based on a book or that the book came from a column written in the 90’s in the New York Observer. That still doesn’t make any of it interesting to me. The whole Sex & The City phenomenon probably did have an effect on making Americans a little less prude in the way they talk about sex, and I can appreciate that from a distance. People in their 40’s and 50’s might be ‘more comfortable talking about sex’ now, but the 20 and 30 somethings I know were teenagers before sex & the city and already talked about sex more candidly than a bunch of white chicks drunk on vodka. We didn’t need their permission, but this is really beside the point.

The point is, I am not OK with The Guardian trying to find the root of a literary shift in Sex & The City. The tail didn’t wag the dog; the culture shifted. Nonfiction and memoir have been on the rise in America for a while now and trying to connect all female essayists back to Sex & The City is just lazy and absurd. Lazy and absurd and irritating.

Freaks Meeks 700 Sads

1. Excellent profile by Michael H. Miller on the excellent Meeks, by Julia Holmes, at the Observer.

2. This dude owns 700 copies of a book called Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. What book do you own the most copies of? [via Electric Lit via Ron Silliman]

3. Brief but pleasant list of quality of Gary Lutz’s writing, blogged by Ryan Kamstra. “For all the self-referential wizardry and playfulness with the expectation of the sentence overpowering his work, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.”

Roundup / 40 Comments
August 4th, 2010 / 12:51 am

Evelyn Hampton—

That we
have no ears to hear the
music the spores shot off
from basidia make obliges us
to busy ourselves microphonically.

-John Cage in Indeterminacy, a lecture performance in which Cage recited a series of one-minute stories and anecdotes in no particular order. Cage was a mycologist and many of the stories were about mushrooms. Some of the mushroom stories are collected here.

Roxane Gay

AWESOME MACHINE PRESS

Adam Robinson is continuing to do good things. He recently started Awesome Machine Press, an imprint of Publishing Genius, which published Say Poem. Adam has really interesting plans.

Books are printed in one run of 125. 25 copies are for discussion (want one? Keep reading). 50 go to the author to sell and 50 are for sale from the press.

After the book sells out it will be available online and for the Kindle and probably the Nook later.

The entire point is fun. Fun writing, fun book making, fun reading, fun talking.

All the other stuff, like work, or caring about stuff, that is not a part of it.

Awesome Machine has fun fast and doesn’t accept submissions, though sometimes submissions through Publishing Genius will make it over to Awesome Machine, probably.

If you have any questions, or would like a discussion copy, contact adam at publishinggenius dot com. The first 25 people in the USA to request these copies will receive them as long as they have at least a blog or whatever to say something about the book or whatever at. (Sorry to people not in the USA. If you want one and want to Paypal about $6 USD for shipping, then all systems go.)

People who pre-order AMP books get free shipping. Then it will cost $1 extra to help defray shipping costs. . . .

You can read more details here. As if that wasn’t great enough, AMP’s next book is Orange Juice by Timothy Willis Sanders who is a great writer and an excellent person. Go, buy the book, tell your friends about it. Make them buy the book too.

Presses / 12 Comments
August 3rd, 2010 / 7:40 pm

Jimmy Chen

Meta Book Covers

I. Surrogate Book as Book

One is given not just a hypothetical cover of the book, but an entire surrogate book as a manifested object residing in space. This may point to modern painting’s preoccupation with the represented vs. the actual, or it may be some self-reflexive fetishism of books themselves, as if to congratulate the reader for picking one — that one — up.

—

On (Not?) Taking For Granted

Turn a key. Empty an ice cube tray. Open a bottle. Hit a forehand. These are actions I took, as the saying goes, for granted. But for the past month I haven’t been able to do those things because of a very painful injury of my right (dominant) wrist. Neither my twice-weekly physical therapist nor my orthopedist can tell me when it might heal; until the pain goes away, the treatment is immobilization, ice, anti-inflammatories, splint, and 14-hour battery patches that pulse medicine into my tendons. No tennis, no piano, no gardening. Driving, cleaning self and home, typing and hand-writing are necessary but very uncomfortable and clumsy.

It could be worse. Is worse, for so many. This is, presumably, temporary, and everything else about my body and my life is fine.

I was all geared up for an active, healthy, productive summer. I moved from a 5th-story loft to a house, close to the ground, apt to fly out of the door at any moment to participate in some active, healthy, productive activity. And write. I would write so much!

Here’s some poetic injustice: all those active, healthy, productive activities are now impossible or painful, whereas most kinds of indulgence and debauchery are totally doable. I can’t chop up vegetables, but I can fry up chicken or order pizza. I can sit at a bar and drink alcohol. I can have most kinds of consensual sex. I can get a pedicure. I can watch tv and order shiny objects from websites.

Just before my injury, I was newly liberated from a fraught romantic entanglement and ready to move into the new place. Free! Independent! I gamely packed and lifted boxes by myself since my romantic entangler was not around to help as planned. And that’s how I injured my wrist. Lifting boxes. Exercise in self-sufficiency: fail.

Hard work and self-reliance not only didn’t pay off but also became nigh impossible. Taking all those activities for granted didn’t cause my injury and giving thanks wouldn’t have prevented it. I take plenty for granted now, and I’ll take everything for granted again. Those things WERE granted to me, until they weren’t.

We’re told not to take things for granted. This is misguided. Plenty is just granted to us, good or bad. If anything, we should take more for granted. Not everything operates under our locus of control. Sometimes we do the right things and get hurt. Sometimes we can’t do anything to make ourselves better. We just have to wait, do nothing productive, indulge ourselves for awhile. Recognizing that we are not autonomous–that is liberating.

Random / 14 Comments
August 3rd, 2010 / 3:04 pm

Blake Butler

Grace Jones on Writing

“God I’m scary. I’m scaring myself.”

“Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.”

“When I started modelling, I’d raise my arms and it was all muscle and all the other models had nothing. Really, everybody thought I was a man. I don’t have to do much to have muscles. It’s just genetic.”

“I also think that men need to be penetrated.”

“Now when I enter a carriage, it almost empties. But there’s always one brave enough to stay.”

“I’VE LOOKED THE DEVIL IN THE FACE, AND GOD, AND SOMEHOW I’VE FOUND A BALANCE. BUT BEING EXTREME IS AT THE SAME TIME A BALANCE – ONE EXTREME BALANCES THE OTHER”

“As a model one is forced to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror and I just started to freak out, like I was going on the other side of the mirror. So I moved every mirror out of my house when I stopped modeling.”

“A legend is someone who has died.”

On Lady Gaga being a copycat: “I really don’t think of her at all. I go about my business.”

“I get bored. I provoke things to happen without even realizing it. I just follow my instincts. I don’t think about it, really.”

“Without daaaancing, it’s a business meeting.”

“Use, don’t abuse.”

On gibberish: “It’s not a made-up language. It relates to everyone… Only the people who are in it.”

“If you take it just for partying, that’s when it goes pear-shaped.”

Craft Notes / 24 Comments
August 3rd, 2010 / 2:22 pm